Mirrorball
On finding ourselves in the Abyss, and a re-introduction to this place.
Let’s begin again.
I’ve never been one to re-watch movies or re-read books. I don’t visit the same restaurants time and time again, opting instead to try new places and flavors as much as I possibly can get away with.
I don’t even listen to the same music very often, even though I was apparently among the top 4% of Spotify listeners last year, meaning I listened to music more often than 96% of their 590 million users. When this statistic popped up on my phone screen as I opened the app to play my “Discover Weekly” playlist one afternoon, something I look forward to each Monday, I wasn’t remotely surprised. It’s almost never quiet in my house, not in my orbit at least. The lyrics and melodies, orchestration and instrumentation of hundreds of songs across many different musical genres fill the air in which I exist almost every single day.
There are simply too many out there to choose from, so much to discover. So many movies-books-songs waiting for their devouring.
Now, it’s one thing to crave new experiences because you have a genuine affection for the thing you are experiencing. It’s another thing to read-watch-listen because you're trying to feed and/or fix an image of yourself.
The latter isn’t necessarily bad, but I’ve learned it can be a symptom of an insidious identity issue. More on this to come.
Always sprinting toward the next thing to fall in love with; hungering for the latest, the freshest, the brand new, I cram experience and productivity into my days as if the measure of my life, somehow, depends on how much I’m absorbing and doing at all times. Like there’s an epiphany buried somewhere in the next song, the next bestseller. I didn’t even realize I did this until my husband walked in on me working out in our garage one day.
“Umm, Lauren? This is a lot. I don’t know how your head doesn’t explode.”
“Huh? Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” I said, pulling the headphones out of my ears. He repeated himself.
I was sweating through a workout on our elliptical machine, which I’d set to a steep incline and a relatively fast pace. But also, I was listening to an audiobook on 2X speed. And also, I was editing photos from a recent photography gig, my laptop perched atop the machine glowed with hundreds of colorful faces, the subjects of my lifestyle work.
I was immediately embarrassed. Not unlike how I feel when he catches me talking to myself, which happens all the time. Thinking out loud, I prefer to euphemize it. I looked, for lack of a kinder word, absolutely nuts – drugged almost. There I was, trying my hardest to optimize every single fiber of the moment. I was attempting to hear and see and make and be as much as I possibly could at one time, which I realized as I watched him watching me, along with all of the smiling faces that glowed on my computer screen - is true for me almost all of the time.
I never sit still. I am never quiet.
Flickering evidence of both concern and a sort of unsettled amusement crossed his face as he stood there taking in the sight of me. One minute I was by myself and off to the races – all of the races, apparently – and the next, I was stopped in my tracks. His eyes gave it away. Oh, I thought. I see it, too.
We spin our wheels. We run in place, desperately racing toward the idea of our own becoming. What, exactly, am I trying to prove here? I wondered this as I stook stock still on that machine after Lucas left the room. Who am I trying to impress? Myself? Is this even impressive to me, all of this movement … all of this doing?
Goals are wonderful things to have - to pursue, to achieve, and to utterly fail at. But the directionless pursuit of more-more-more is where I found myself in that moment. I wasn’t goal oriented so much as I was improvement oriented. If I just keep cracking on, moving forward, I thought - I’ll get to wherever it is I’m supposed to be going. I’ll be better.
I’ll feel better.
But I’ve only recently come to terms with the truer side of things. I’ve never really been trying to get anywhere at all, I don’t think. Nowhere concrete, at least. I’ve mostly been trying to compensate for what I think I’m missing. Seeking external epiphanies when they’ve been buried inside all along.
When we tailor our becoming – our evolution and growth - around what isn’t there rather than what we truly are, we’re doing little more than playing dress-up with ghosts.
This is a nice way to lose oneself. I know this to be true firsthand.
Rushing toward who we think we are supposed to be, tweaking, fixing, correcting … ever in pursuit of the very best versions of ourselves … we broaden the abyss between what’s real and what’s just a glittering illusion in the distance. I know she’s there, just around the corner.
The distance each of us places between who we really are and who we want everyone (ourselves included) to think we are holds more opportunity for discovery, exploration and growth than any earthly landscape could ever contain. I call it The Abyss. All the previous versions of ourselves float there, all of the skins we’ve shed – the ones lived in and loved in, the ones that felt comfortable and the ones we’d trade if we could.
I recently glimpsed a version of myself there; someone I’d refused to look at for a really long time.
Where did I go? These are the questions that catalyze our own journeys of self-discovery, our own plunges down into the deep.
The abyss is why I’m here, always writing and seeking, just searching for clues.
When we stop trying to improve and evolve for a minute, and just shut up and listen - the abyss begins to shrink, it brightens. It gets clearer and simpler until finally you can look across and see yourself in that clearing, plain as day. There I am.
To fully know, accept and live as our whole, authentic selves, we have to look outward as well, because we don't exist in vacuums. We are everyone we have ever known, every place we have ever been, every song, every dance, every breeze, every single excruciating and lovely thing. We are built by the world in which we live, its people, places and things are the architects of our own becoming. If it’s our stories that guide us, then we must tell them with as much full-throated honesty as we can muster, holding space for the whole world. Even if it’s hard. Even if it hurts. Even if you have to break your own heart in the process.
This little space of mine is like a mirrorball. It’s meant to be a gathering of reflections all bound by the common threads of nourishment, identity and belonging – it explores all of our multitudes. Its words and ideas fit together just so, with shimmering meditations on all the things that contribute to our sense of becoming. Writing this way, with lots of truth and vulnerability, feels like picking up broken shards of yourself, pieces that you’ve swept away for years, and carefully gluing them back together. I’m holding all of my stories up to the light and allowing the colors and complexities to spill out, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.
We tell our stories and raise them up as mirrors, in the hopes that someone, somewhere will see themself, too. I’ve written that before because it’s the whole point. When we hold others’ stories of these universal themes up against the backdrop of our own experiences, they look and feel different. We find new sides of ourselves as we listen, leaving room for our own discovery and greater understanding. That’s how it works. I don’t know about you, but I find this to be a fantastic thing. They connect us, our stories do, and in a world that sometimes feels as if it’s going to cave in on itself from pure divisiveness, the importance of this cannot be overstated. The sharing of stories is an essential, sacred thing.
And so. We speak them to those who are willing to listen. We write them to those who want to see. We sing them to the ones who seek to feel the words in their souls. We scream them to those who need it most. We draw and capture them. We rhyme them, too. We play them, carve and build them up for all to see. We dance them, from one heart to another, so we don’t lose the steps, so we don’t lose our way.
They bind us. They give us something to hang on to, to draw from when we’re running on empty, when we don’t know where to go next.
James Baldwin spoke of mirroring as an act of love. “{Love is} the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in these moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
For better or worse, we humans - we, the collective of beating, bleeding hearts - we march on. We stay alive despite and because of the things we make and the stories we share. When we become still enough to let them rise and to come fully into focus, we gather what we need from the hard stuff and we grow, each reflection throwing a spark into the shadows, each story a beacon, guiding us toward each other and back to ourselves.
It is a dropping of the guard, a surrendering to the necessary stillness that this type of internal/external work requires. I’ve been doing lots of writing like this lately and am finding so much good in the rewinding … around the people, places, and things that made me; I’m rewatching and re-listening.
I’m letting them all the way in.
